Tropical Storm Irene wreaked havoc on rivers and streams in southern Vermont, leaving communities stranded, washing out roads and bridges, and destroying homes when waters rose to 100-year, and in some cases, even 500-year, flood levels.
Thousands of tons of sand, gravel, and rock were washed out of roadbeds and deposited in streams and rivers, changing their characters forever.
The state quickly gave towns and villages permission to use the fluvial debris to rebuild access roads immediately.
Just as quickly, excavators, backhoes, bulldozers, and huge dump trucks massed around the river and stream beds around Vermont to accomplish that task.
Municipalities began work to “relocate streams to a former location,” “re-establish channel capacity,” “facilitate stream stability,” and “reestablish stream crossings.”
But the Compliance and Enforcement Division of the state Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) has begun responding to complaints lodged by residents who have environmental concerns since that in-stream activity began.
Act 250 after Irene
River and stream beds have been off limits since 1970 through Act 250, an environmental protection act that controls land use and development.
“Gravel and rock fill for road and infrastructure repair is critical to Vermont's post-Irene response,” said ANR Secretary Deb Markowitz, who granted suspension of Act 250 enforcement immediately following the flooding from Irene
“To assure availability of material that has been requested by the state or towns for such repairs, the Natural Resources Board [ which enforces Act 250] is temporarily suspending enforcement of extraction limits and trucking, and is allowing closed gravel pits and rock quarries to be reopened on an as-needed basis.“
Verbal permits for the dredging given from the ANR were honored through the beginning of October.
At that time the state began to require written permits for all streambed alteration and gravel removal, according to Compliance and Enforcement Director Gary Kessler.
Kessler said the ANR is following up on complaints.
“The locations with the most number of complaints will be the first we will look into,” he said.
Prepared for the emergency
Grafton was one of the hardest towns hit with roads washed out, preventing access in or out for three days.
But it was also one of the best prepared.
Town Emergency Management Incident Commander Bill Kearns, a former FEMA attorney and now a Grafton resident, knew what to expect and parked machinery at the fire and rescue department, recruited contractors, and then obtained faxed approval from ANR's District 2 Environmental Commission Coordinator, April Hensel, to “open any pit you want” to fix the roads on Monday, the day after Irene hit.
As a result, three days later, residents and homeowners were able to get into and out of Grafton on roads that were “not up to standard,” but nonetheless allowed traffic.
For weeks, in an attempt to repair river channels and protect property farther downriver in Saxtons River, backhoes, bulldozers, and excavators lumbered into the river and began moving rocks and sediment, berming some and carting the rest away to “be stockpiled in the Rockingham highway yards,” according to R. J. Furgat, the operator/foreman of Buck Adams Trucking and Excavating LLC in Westminster, contracted by the town of Rockingham to deal with the emergency.
One of the results of severe flooding is likely to be that “the river bed was raised,” in some places by several feet, according to Furgat, by gravel, rock and sediment.
“We've been hired to remove the excess gravel and clear the debris, as well as [re-]make channels and pools for the river to flow more like what it used to do,” said Furgat.
A mile or so downstream along Route 121, another contractor, Bazin Brothers Trucking, also of Westminster, spent several weeks clearing debris and berming the banks of the river with gravel from the riverbed, then leveling it.
Bazin Brothers subsequently set up a gravel grading and crushing operation on the north side of the river in the flood plain where, before the flood, a farmer's cattle had grazed.
Heavy equipment was kept busy moving the gravel to be graded and crushed, after which Westminster town dump trucks hauled away the gravel for the town.
Of time and the river
Time shows its effects on rivers and streams slowly, so human memories are short when it comes to events that result in flooding and damage.
Floods leave rich soil that is good for crops, and farmers along the Connecticut River have built and farmed floodplains for several centuries.
Besides being scenic, riverside floodplains provide flat and smooth building sites and, in spite of historic flooding, town zoning has allowed such land use.
But with the damage costs rising into the billions of dollars following Tropical Storm Irene, the state is encouraging towns to rethink planning and implement greater controls on development in floodplains.
“People don't like to change,” Markowitz said, however. “It's not going to be easy.”
A third-generation Vermonter, Caitlin Noel, executive director of the Friends of the Mad River, pointed out that rivers “operate on an entirely different time scale than humans.”
Noel, who holds a bachelor of science in Environmental Science from the University of Vermont, said that rivers have been “moving and changing since the retreat of the glaciers 10,000 years ago, meandering across floodplains, and moving sediment as our mountains continue to wear down over the course of geologic time.”
“The issue of dredging and stream alteration has been a very polarizing one,” Noel continued. “However, I believe that people on both sides of the issue want the same thing: to protect our communities from harm.”
“The two camps simply disagree about the best way to do that,” she said.
Noel added that the view that advocates keeping dredging to a minimum “is based on scientific evidence collected in rivers over time and space.”
“Scientists have documented what happens when you channelize, dredge, widen, and armor rivers over the years in places around the world, and the science is clear,” she said: dredging is damaging to waterbodies.
As such, Noel said that ANR, as do many other states, and many European countries, limits the amount of gravel that can be removed from a stream, and regulates the types of channel management.
“[ANR] takes a watershed approach, understanding that river systems are interconnected, and the actions that are taken in one place can reach and affect the conditions of the river in upstream and downstream locations,” Noel said.
But Irene may have changed all that, Noel noted, and by the time ANR responded with guidelines, “the damage had already been done.”
In a study of selected streams affected by Irene, Rich Kirn, a fisheries biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, noted a loss of 33-58 percent in wild trout populations following the storm,, compared to surveys before the storm.
“Young fish were particularly affected [0-37 percent of pre-flood levels], while older trout fared better [41-64 percent of pre-flood levels],” Kim said.
Kirn also noted that the impact of in-stream flood recovery activities “such as channelization, excessive stream bed excavation, and large-scale natural wood removal greatly reduces the quality and diversity of aquatic habitats necessary to sustain fish and other aquatic populations.”
He added that is difficult to say whether it would take longer for a river to recover from catastrophic changes from a natural disaster of the magnitude of Tropical Storm Irene, or from the extensive damage that is being caused by what he called “misguided human intervention.”
“It is my understanding that Vermont's rivers are still in a period of adjustment due to historic channel straightening that occurred in the 1800s,” he said.
What happens next time?
Noel wants to know what will be different “next time,” as everyone - from climate scientists to environmentalists to Gov. Peter Shumlin to Markowitz - agrees that there will be a next time.
She noted that the inadequate number of technical staff in the state available to respond to the emergency did not come close to meeting the needs of the towns and villages dealing with cleanup following Irene.
Markowitz said that all the state's agencies involved in the Irene disaster - from the Agency of Transportation, to the Agency of Natural Resources, to the Department of Environmental Conservation - are “stepping back to say, in the case of another event like this one, what are the lessons learned?”
“We want to be sure we have the capacity to meet the need” should a similar event recur, Markowitz added.
“In this particular case, we had over 2,000 streams and impacted areas that [still] need to be addressed,” she said, admitting that the response following Irene was “not a realistic way to deal with it.”
In an ANR study from 1999, “Options for State Flood Control Policies and a Flood Control Program,” the agency admitted that “flood recovery operations have historically and frequently addressed only the symptoms of a greater problem rather than focusing on identification of the cause and determining how to facilitate improved system stability.”
“This is somewhat a funding-driven shortcoming, but a problem of institutional focus as well,” the report warned.
Shumlin called for an international task force in August “to study issues related to flooding on Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River,” following spring flooding that destroyed homes and property all around Lake Champlain, in New York, Quebec, and Vermont.
Markowitz noted that “because of that experience, we had already made it a priority to have a more proactive approach” to mitigating and controlling flooding in state.
However, the biologic impacts on habitat following Irene have not yet been fully assessed, as the state continues to grapple with the damage to the infrastructure of roads, highways, and bridges, and biological and habitat assessments of the damage to private and municipal property continue.
With Vermonters coming to grips with a changing climate that includes increased precipitation, Shumlin urges residents to start to “change how we do things, and think about where we build our communities and developments.”
“Our city and town planning must reflect what we know about where floods occur, and not build there,” he said.
Those who fail to heed current warnings, Markowitz said, might find themselves disqualified from receiving FEMA assistance should a similar event occur.
“We know it's not if, but when,” she said.